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Hand Flare
A Flare, also sometimes called a fusee, is a type of pyrotechnic that produces a brilliant light or intense heat without an explosion. Flares are used for signalling, illumination, or defensive countermeasures in civilian and military applications. Flares may be ground pyrotechnics, projectile pyrotechnics, or parachute-suspended to provide maximum illumination time over a large area. Projectile pyrotechnics may be dropped from aircraft, fired from rocket or artillery, or deployed by Flare Guns or handheld percussive tubes. Battlefield Play4Free The Hand Flare appears in Battlefield Play4Free as the Front Line Flare for the Front Line Medic training option. Once deployed, it allows teammates to spawn near the flare. Unlike the Request Reinforcements flare, it is deployed on the ground rather than being fired into the air. Overview Front Line Medic is an skill acquired after allocating one training point to the ability. Only one training point may be allocated, and they are no further upgrades for the ability. Once the training point has been used to gain the Front Line Medic skill, the Front Line Flare will be placed in the player's inventory. It must be placed onto the medic's equipment bar in order to be used. Once within a game, the medic can use deploy the front line flare as a spawn beacon for teammates. Any teammates who die within the nearby area may be spawned upon the beacon - including the medic themselves. Front line flares cannot be spawned upon when they are within the mainbase or nearby a firebase under control of an enemy. Front line flares can be destroyed by allied and enemy fire, and will eventually deactivate. Notes *The Front Line Flare, unlike claymores or landmines, are not marked by small icon for allied units. Seemingly allied flares can be enemy spawn beacons, and allies may mistake allied flares as an enemies. *The Front Line Flare is immediately deployed within the area when it is selected, and it will take a few seconds before being deployed. Take this into consideration when entering the field. *Upon deployment, the Front Line Flare will generate a large amount of smoke towards the left hand side. This smoke may pass through walls and may alert enemies to your flare. Battlefield 4 The Hand Flare is an equippable grenade type for all kits in Battlefield 4. It is the final grenade unlocked, after the M84 Flashbang. The Hand Flare is unique among the grenades in that it is a utility grenade like the M18 Smoke Grenade. The Flare cannot do any direct damage and instead creates a very bright red flame along with a small plume of red smoke. Deployed Hand Flares also cause a small amount of terrain deformation in areas with softer ground, like sand or grass, creating a small crater. With this, the Flare provides a small amount of concealment with the smoke, and flame has slight blinding effect on players nearby. This is mostly apparent on darker maps, like Dawnbreaker or Infiltration of Shanghai, where Flares can serve as excellent light sources and signaling tools. However, Hand Flares are still very effective at obstructing visibility on other maps when multiple Flares are deployed in a single area, especially small corridors or hallways, as the red smoke is difficult to see through and the flames are quite bright. When flares are deployed within the smoke cloud of an M18, the smoke cloud turns bright red, making it very diffcult to see anything through. Using both grenades in tandem on small maps or chokepoints like the hallways leading to the B flag (C on Conquest Large) of Operation Locker can effectivley block off said hallway, unless infantry are willing to go through the cloud, which will lead them to getting mowed down. The Hand Flare also functions as a counter to the night vision IRNV and FLIR scopes. Deployed flares will blind night vision optics with white light if they are looked at directly with scope, making them useless to aim with. This is especially effective on the FLIR due to it using white-hot thermal imaging, so the effect is somewhat amplified compared to the IRNV. Hand Flares can be good counters to players using these scopes to fire through smoke, throwing a Flare into the smoke will blind their optics and force them to move to a different area to see around the smoke. The Hand Flare can also be utilised as a creative anti-vehicle weapon. In game modes where 3D Spotting is disabled such as Hardcore, many light and heavy-armored vehicle operators would rely heavily on Thermal or IRNV Optics over the default Zoom Optics to acquire targets. In such cases, it is not uncommon for many vehicle operators to have Thermal or IRNV Optics turned on for the duration of the game and never turning it off. The Hand Flare can be used in a creative trap by masking gadgets such as C4, M2 SLAMS or AT Mines that would other wise be easily noticed by spotting or identified by special optics. The brightness of the flare will blind all optics which exposes itself to the flare and masking the explosive. As such, many unsuspecting vehicle operators may proceed to either turn off their Optics, or keep their Optics turned on and drive across the Hand Flare in thinking it is nothing but harmless usually resulting in target destruction. However, bare in mind in such game modes that Friendly Fire may be enabled, and thus friendly vehicles will also be effected by this. As such, it is recommended to only install the trap in places near enemy controlled areas or the enemy un-capturable base where collateral damage to friendly forces is minimum a risk. Patch History All grenades were rebalanced with Battlefield 4'sFall 2014 patch to discourage grenade spamming. Originally, the Hand Flare had a resupply time of 1 second, so if a player was standing on an Ammunition Box they would essentially have an unlimited amount to continually throw, which was somewhat of a problem in smaller gamemodes like Team Deathmatch. As a result, the Hand Flare's resupply time was increased to 6 seconds from 1, although it still remained the fastest resupplying grenade available. BF4_HandFlare.png|'Hand Flare' BF4_HandFlareActive.jpg|Deployed Hand Flare BF4 flirblind.png|Blinding effect of the Hand Flare on the FLIR scope BF4 irnvblind.png|Blind effect on the IRNV scope BF4_Vehicle_FLIR_Blind.png|Blinding effect on Vehicle Thermal Optics. BF4 Vehicle IRNV Blind.png|Blinding effect on Vehicle IRNV Optics. BF4_Flare_Loadout.png|Hand Flare on the customisation screen. Battlefield 1 In the early version of Incursions game mode, the Raid Leader kit offers a Spawn Beacon that takes the form of a blue hand flare. Trivia *At Gamescom 2013, commentator Corey Dunn mentioned that the hand flare is capable of burning infantry. However, in the actual game, they do only a very small amount of damage. *It is possible to kill an enemy player with the Hand flare. A reliable method to do this is to equip the Engineer kit with M2 SLAMs and a DMR. Then, the player must place an M2 SLAM near an unsuspecting enemy player and shoot it once with the DMR before throwing a hand flare. After a second or so, the flare will do enough damage to detonate the M2 SLAM, killing the player and counting it as a kill with the hand flare on the killfeed. This method will only work if performed on deformable terrain (grass, dirt, and sand) as the Flare will not trigger the SLAM unless it creates a crater in the ground.Hand Flare - Terrible Weapon Challenge -- Battlefield 4 - YouTube, retrieved 2014-09-09 References Category:Grenades of Battlefield 4 Category:Night combat